Drake seeks to continue service as Lenawee County probate judge

Thursday

Editor’s note: This is the first of four profiles of the candidates running to be Lenawee County probate judge.

ADRIAN — An expectation of public service in Kristi Drake’s upbringing has led her to run for Lenawee County probate judge.

“That drew me to the type of work I have done for the last 20 years,” she said.

During that time, Drake was a magistrate in Lenawee County District Court and has been a referee and mediator in family court cases. She has been the director of the Lenawee County Friend of the Court and the circuit court administrator since 2013.

“Becoming a judge is really just the next step in that progression of my career,” she said.

Drake is running against the incumbent, Lenawee County Probate Judge Gregg P. Iddings, and two other challengers, Adrian attorneys Todd Morgan and Catherine Sala, in the Aug. 7 primary. The two candidates who receive the most votes will advance to the general election in November.

Drake said she probably would not be running for probate judge if Iddings had not been suspended for sexually harassing his former secretary. Iddings served a six-month suspension ordered by the Michigan Supreme Court during the last half of 2017.

“His behavior was offensive, and I think the cost to our county was offensive, to me,” she said.

As the circuit court administrator, she said she was aware of the cost beyond the settlement, such as paying a visiting judge to hear cases.

“And you have the public trust facet of that, which is, how do you trust someone in that position when they’re making such poor choices personally and they’re using public funds to remedy their shortcomings,” she said.

Drake said she wants to be probate judge because of the people who find themselves in those cases. She described them as some of the “most vulnerable people in the community.”

“I’m about families and supporting them, and I think that that’s the best place to do that,” she said. “Whether you’re trying to take a kid who’s a juvenile delinquent and turn them around so they don’t end up going to jail as an adult; or you’re trying to help someone who’s mentally ill get the services that they need, which I’m concerned about because our hospital’s not going to have a mental health ward. Those kinds of things are on people’s minds when you’re talking about probate court.”

She said abuse and neglect cases are big issues for her.

“You need somebody like me (as probate judge) who’s a parent,” Drake said, “who understands what it’s like to be a parent, who understands what you need to have to be capable of taking care of a child, and then providing people who don’t know how to do that with the services that they need so they can figure it out.”

She said she wants to keep families intact and would like to have drug court or sobriety court be an option for probate cases.

“Especially in the case of abuse and neglect, we’re seeing a lot more cases where you have a chemical dependency that’s a problem and that’s preventing them from parenting,” Drake said. “If you can get them help and have them actually succeed at staying clean, they can be good parents if you can get them on that path, but I don’t know if we’re doing enough to do that.”

She said the most important role of probate judges is to take advantage of the services available to them to help families in need.

“These are the really important issues in people’s lives,” she said. “Protecting them and taking care of them and finding help for them when they need it, I think that’s more important a role in our community sometimes than enforcing laws and putting people in jail.”

Drake said she is in favor of using alternative dispute resolution practices, such as mediation.

“We have done a really good job in the circuit court with the family division cases, with our civil cases, to promote resolution outside of litigation,” she said. “That should continue because, in my experience doing it, the parties are much more satisfied when they have had a role in coming up with the resolution.”

She said she finds that part of her work “very rewarding,” particularly in domestic relations cases where she and the parties involved in the cases talk through possible situations so they can make plans for when things come up.

“We know what we’re going to do when life happens and that gets in the way of our normal schedule,” she said.

As Friend of the Court director, she said she has implemented more online parenting classes. Those have proven to be so popular that the the in-person classes are being phased out.

The Friend of the Court also offers free mediation services to families working out custody issues.

As circuit court administrator, she said she “spearheaded” a recent project to install computer monitors in the judicial building hallways to help direct people to where they need to be.

“We were forever having people show up in the wrong place,” she said.

Her interest in the law began while growing up in a military family in Bay City. Her father was an Army major. She said she had an opportunity to job shadow with a district court judge when she was in the fourth or fifth grade and was drawn to that kind of work.

“I was enamored with the whole thing,” she said. “I came home and said, ‘I’m going to go to law school, and I’m going to be a judge when I grow up.’ ”

In high school she took a public speaking class and clerked for a law firm. She worked for a prosecutor’s office as a victim’s advocate while attending Grand Valley State University in Allendale. After graduating in three years from GVSU in 1993, she received her law degree from the University of Detroit in 1996.

While in law school, she was working at a law firm in Detroit and looking for an internship. Her mother knew a judge in Hillsdale County, and he put Drake in touch with Lenawee County Circuit Judge Timothy P. Pickard. That led to an unpaid internship with Pickard.

“He liked me so much that he convinced the county commissioners that they should come up with a little money to keep me,” she said.

The commissioners kept her on in a paid position as a research attorney for the circuit and probate courts.

Pickard, who retired in 2014, has endorsed Drake for probate judge.

“Her integrity is impeccable,” Pickard wrote in an endorsement when Drake announced her candidacy in March. “She is bright, articulate, and a person of good judgment. The Probate Court in Lenawee County is in desperate need of these qualities.”

Pickard also cited Drake’s work experience.

After working for Pickard, Drake was a magistrate in Lenawee County District Court for 16 years. One task magistrates perform is hearing small-claims cases.

The experience hearing small-claims cases was educational, Drake said. She realized how nervous people can be going to court and that letting people have a say helps them feel like they received a fair hearing.

She also has 21 years of experience as a family court referee and 17 years as a family court mediator.

“My experience is actually probably superior (to the other candidates) in some ways because I have been sitting, hearing cases as an impartial jurist, for over 20 years,” Drake said. “I know what it’s like to run a courtroom, I know the rules of evidence. I know what people should be presenting in their cases, and I’ve listened to thousands of cases and made decisions on them. If you’re talking about courtroom experience, I probably have a lot more of it than all of them, put together.”

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